This word's horticultural roots are really branches.
Vaccines are on many people's minds these days, as we hope and wait for scientists and doctors to develop one that can give us all immunity from the coronavirus and allow normal life to resume. You may see or hear a vaccine referred to as an inoculation, or read that someone was inoculated with a vaccine. Are they synonyms? We covered vaccine in an earlier post, but where does inoculate come from?
Bear with us here, because we have to make a detour through this apple orchard. Apples don't reproduce true to type, meaning the seeds from a honeycrisp will not grow into a tree that produces honeycrisps. This is because apples require pollination from other apple trees, so the seeds of the resulting fruit will often be an unpredictable hybrid. Because of this, apples are propagated by grafting, wherein small branches, known as scions, are cut from desirable trees and spliced onto other saplings where they grow and produce fruit.
Oculus means "eye" in Latin, and also "bud," as in the bud on a tree branch that opens into a flower or leaf. Grafting uses these bud spots to make incisions and insert the new branches, tricking the tree into growing them as if they were its own. Oculus comes from the Proto-Indo-European root okw-, which is the ancestor of words for "eye" in many languages. So inoculare means "to graft" or "to implant." In- is a common prefix that we see on countless words, from infect to ingratiate. It also comes from P.I.E., in this case en-, meaning "in."
Inoculate arrived in English around the mid-fifteenth century, where it referred to grafting buds. And because of that specific action — of making an incision and inserting something into an organism to grow and produce a desirable result — inoculation was an evocative name when people started using intentional cowpox infections to fight the much deadlier smallpox virus. Its first recorded use describing the deliberate infection of a person with a virus to confer immunity was in 1714. Once the smallpox vaccine was invented in 1796, inoculate quickly became synonymous with vaccinate, and its noun form inoculation is equivalent to vaccination.
We're running down the origins of some pandemic-related words. Here are a few more:
It's Everywhere You Don't Want To Be: "Pandemic"
Going Viral: The Origins of "Contagious"
40 Days of Solitude: The Origin Story of Quarantine
Dom- Sweet Dom- : Homing In on the Origins of Domestic
